Tips & Tricks

Ever wonder why your iPhone vibrates whether or not it’s set to silent mode? The answer lies in a simple setting that—depending on the number of calls you have coming in—might be able to eke out a little extra battery life throughout the day. To change this, open up the Settings app, then tap on Sounds. On that page you’ll see two on/off toggles labeled “Vibrate”—one under Silent, and one under Ringer and Alerts. Simply go down to the latter one and make sure it’s set to off, and from then on your phone won’t vibrate unless it’s set to silent mode, saving you an extra bit of battery life and potentially saving it from rattling around and falling on the floor.

Have any tracks hanging out in your library that were ripped from CD, and therefore include one song, a few minutes of silence, and then a bonus track afterward? Well, this tip—an oldie but a goodie—will show you how to split the two using nothing but iTunes.

Simply find out the time code for when the hidden song starts, make sure you have the track selected, go to File > Get Info or hit Command-I on the keyboard, go to the Options tab, and then set the Start Time to the start of the hidden track. Hit OK, and then with the song still selected, go to Advanced > Create AAC Version, or select the same option by right-clicking on the track. After a short conversion process, you’ll have two copies of the track, one of which is complete, and one of which contains only the hidden track. You can then go back in, set the Start Time on the original to 0:00 and the Stop Time to the end of the first track, leaving you with both songs intact but none of the silence.

The aluminum remote that comes with the second-generation Apple TV has been praised for its sleek form and intentionally minimalist array of buttons, and while most of its functions are self-explanatory, there are a few tricks you should know if you want to get the most out of it.

For example, you can get to the main menu from anywhere just by holding down the “Menu” button. If you’re playing music and would like to start a Genius playlist based on the song you’re listening to, hold down the select button. When you’re watching video, you can tap the down button and then use the left or right buttons to skip through chapters. We could go on, but to be honest, there aren’t any tricks for the aluminum wand that will make it better than Apple’s excellent—and free—Remote app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, so if you have an iOS device around the house, be sure to download and install Remote to take full advantage of your Apple TV.

Over the years, Safari on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has become more capable, incrementally gaining features from its desktop counterpart. One of those features—AutoFill—can come in extremely handy, but doesn’t necessarily get used a lot because it’s not turned on by default. To add this trick to your mobile web browsing arsenal, open the Settings app, tap on Safari, and then tap on AutoFill. On the screen that appears, you’ll need to turn Use Contact Info on, Names & Passwords on—if you want—and tap the My Info area to select your own entry from your list of contacts, letting Safari in on specifics like your address, phone number, and other details it can use to automatically populate forms, saving you time and frustration.

Long before the advent of iTunes LP, Apple offered—and still does offer—so-called Digital Booklets with certain album purchases. Unfortunately, these files have been basically useless outside of iTunes, as Apple has never offered a good way to organize and view them on its portable devices—until it added PDF support iBooks. While it might not do it automatically, iTunes does offer an easy way to gather these Booklets up and move them over to iBooks.

If you’re one of the million-plus people who took the leap and installed Lion on your Mac last week, odds are you know about the new OS’ Full-Screen App feature—but if you haven’t upgraded to iTunes 10.4, you might be missing out. One of the first things you might notice upon launching the app in Lion is a pair of diagonal arrows pointing out towards the corners of the screen—these are there to let you turn on Full Screen mode, which can also be activated by hitting control-command-F on the keyboard.

Ever receive a text from someone that was mysteriously cut off at the end, only for the rest to appear later in a separate text—or worse yet, receive the end of a text before the beginning? That happens when you run over the limit of 160 characters that some carriers use to keep SMS messages small. For iPhone owners using iOS 4 or later, there’s a simple way to ensure that you won’t be joining the broken text crowd. Open the Settings app, tap on Messages, and make sure that the slider for Character Count is turned on—and that’s it. Once you hit 30 characters when composing a message, a counter will appear overtop the Send button, letting you see how many characters you’ve used, and thus letting you figure out how many you have left.

Ever noticed that when you receive a call on the iPhone and it’s on, you get two options for dealing with the call—Answer or Decline—but if the phone is off, all you get is the slide to answer notice at the bottom? Believe it or not, you actually still have multiple options available to you. By tapping the volume or sleep/wake buttons, you can silence the ringer with ease. But if that’s not enough, simply tap the sleep/wake button twice in succession and it will have the same effect as tapping the Decline button, sending the caller directly to your voicemail system.

With the announcement of the next-generation iPhone quickly approaching, now would be a great time to check on whether you’ll be able to qualify for the subsidized—or in layman’s terms, cheap—pricing. As it turns out, both AT&T and Verizon let you do that right from your phone. AT&T users will want to dial *639#, while Verizon customers can hit up #UPG—with either carrier, you’ll soon after receive a text message telling you whether you’ll be able to pick up the next iPhone on the cheap or whether you’ll be waiting for a while longer.

If you’ve had your iPhone for very long, odds are you’ve noticed that it isn’t shy about reminding you that you’ve got an incoming text or MMS message that you haven’t gotten around to looking at—a problem that can sometimes lead to you thinking you have more messages than you really have. There’s a simple way to take control of this potentially aggravating feature, however. Open up the Settings app, tap on Messages, and then tap on Play Alert Tone. From here, you can bring the number of times it will alert you down to once or twice, or crank things up ‘til it’s going off 10 times for each text, or enough to make you sound like the most popular person in the room.

If you’ve ordered something online, odds are you’ll get a shipment notification via email—and that means it’s likely to show up in Mail on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Luckily, Apple’s latest versions of iOS can automatically parse UPS and FedEx tracking numbers, giving you fast access to the whereabouts of your latest arrival. To take advantage of this feature, simply find the tracking number in the email, and tap and hold until an option to Track Shipment appears, and tap on that to be taken to the courier’s tracking page. It’s a lot easier for the anxious than trying to copy and paste the number every time. Trust us.

The ability to take your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad into an Apple Store for service is great—but handing over all of your personal info? Not so much. If you’re getting your iOS device replaced, selling it, or simply handing an older model over to a family member, you’ll want to get all your contacts, calendars, and other personal data off the device—and luckily, there’s an easy, built-in feature in iOS for doing exactly that. Open the Settings app, tap on General, and scroll to the bottom of the screen until you see the button for Reset. Tap on that, and then tap Erase All Content and Settings. The device will have you verify that this is what you want to do—you are erasing everything, after all—and will then do its thing, rebooting afterwards into the same state it was in when you first took it out of the box.

Being able to dial your iPhone using nothing but your voice is one of the coolest tricks of iOS’ Voice Control feature, and it works great most of the time. Sometimes, though, it can get hung up on hard-to-pronounce names—let’s use Samir Nagheenanajar as an example. To help Voice Control recognize his last name, all you need to do is open the Contacts app, tap on Samir’s name, and tap Edit. Down at the bottom of the page, you’ll see an option to add a field. Tap on this, select Phonetic Last Name, and type in something along the lines of “Na-ghee-na-na-jar”, then tap the done button. For contacts with a difficult first name, you’d use the same steps, but select Phonetic First Name instead. Before you know it, your iPhone will know how to say your friends’ names better than you do.

Ever launch a game or start to watch a video and realize that you could stand to lower the volume, only to be thwarted when you start hitting the iPhone’s side volume buttons and see the “ringer” designation? We sure have. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Simply open up the Settings app, tap on Sounds, and look under Ringer and Alerts. You’ll see a volume slider, and then a toggle for “Change with Buttons,” which you’ll want to switch off, and voila—no more misunderstood taps on the volume controls. After all, if you really want to turn your ringer down, odds are you want your phone in vibrate mode—and there’s already a switch for that.

Whether it’s an unresponsive device, an upgrade gone bad, or some other sort of software-based gremlin, sometimes you literally have to force iTunes to recognize and restore your iOS device. Short for Device Firmware Update, DFU mode is a last resort for bringing misbehaving units back to working order—and here’s how to trigger it.

To start, you need to have the device plugged into your computer via USB, and then turn it off. Once it’s completely powered down, press and hold both the sleep/wake and Home buttons for ten seconds. After ten seconds, release the sleep/wake button but continue to hold the Home button down until you see a pop-up alert from iTunes telling you that it has “detected an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch in recovery mode,” and that it needs to restore the device before it can be used. If your device starts up normally without seeing this pop-up, simply try the process again—sometimes it takes a couple tries. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always the Genius Bar!

For those of you with smaller hands, you may have noticed that it’s not always easy to reach the back button on iPhone and iPod touch Music app’s Now Playing screen when you’re holding the device one-handed. Luckily, Apple has built-in another form of navigation: simply swipe to the right on this screen and the app will return to the menu you were last looking at, letting you easily choose another song. It’s not the most complicated tip, but if you ever need it, it sure comes in handy.

Today’s tips is aimed at the urban dwellers. Do you frequently notice that your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is asking you to join random, unknown networks while you’re walking, riding, or even just sitting at a nearby café? Unless you like these interruptions, there’s an easy way to rid yourself of these annoying notifications. Simply open the Settings app, tap Wi-Fi, and set the “Ask to Join Networks” slider to off. Now your device will only connect to networks that it’s previously connected to—like the ones at your home and work—unless you open that same Wi-Fi menu and manually look for a new connection. It can be a little less handy, but it’s also a lot less aggravating.

More than likely you’re accustomed to using iTunes’ tabbed device management interface for handling what apps, music, videos, and other media you want on your devices. But did you know that you can add just a few items quickly and easily without ever having to change those settings? Simply drag-and-drop any app or content you want from your iTunes library to the iOS device’s listing in the sidebar. iTunes will automatically add it to the device—assuming there’s enough available space—even if you’ve got automatic syncing turned on.

Announced this week as part of Apple’s new iCloud service, you can now set your iOS devices and iTunes to automatically download new purchases made on other devices. On your iOS device running 4.3.3, go in to the Settings apps and tap on Store. Right at the top, you’ll see slider toggles for turning Automatic Downloads of Music, Apps, and Books on and off. In addition, there’s a separate option below that on 3G-enabled devices that lets you decide whether you’d like them to download purchases over the cellular network when you’re away from Wi-Fi.

In iTunes 10.3, the process is just as simple. Open the iTunes > Preferences… menu, click the Store tab, and then click the three check boxes for the Automatic Downloads of Music, Apps, and Books as you’d like. From now on, whenever you purchase a song, app, or book on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or home computer, you’ll find it waiting for you the next time you use one of your other devices.

As you might have heard, Apple has announced iTunes in the Cloud, allowing users to download past iTunes Store music and music video purchases directly to their iPhones, iPads, or iPod touches, free of charge. If your device is running iOS 4.3.3, simply open the iTunes Store app and look at the bottom row of tabs. You should see a new tab called Purchased, from which you can access and download all your past iTunes Store music purchases. You can look for specific songs by searching, browse past purchases via Recent Purchases or Not On This iPhone automatically-populated lists, or browse by artist. When you’ve found the song or album you were looking for, simply tap the cloud download button to the right of the listing. Just remember that if you’re on 3G, these downloads will count against your data limit, so try to stay away from grabbing up album after album until you’re back on Wi-Fi.